the politics of DISSobedience

charlie's reading log | let's keep it casual

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"Nasturtium" - original poem by me

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Here finally Kant perceives the true rift between them: Julian doesn’t know the difference between embarrassment and shame. How shame soaks, stains, leaves a skidmark on everything and, when it has nothing to stick to, spreads until it does. Embarrassment is contained by incidents, gets funny and small over time; shame runs gangrene through the entire past, makes the future impossible. You can’t own it or laugh it off, only try to bail it out in sloshing bucketfuls, drenching yourself in the process. Embarrassment is an event, shame a condition, one that Julian has somehow either mastered or never experienced, which explains why he’s so easygoing, and why, to him, the world is so tractable, why all seems fixable with talk. What’s inside Julian is smooth and fragrant, his desires desirable, and so his words are gift wrap, sometimes sloppy but always appreciated. Whereas if Kant ever relaxes his vigilance, allows his own sick and malign requirements to escape through the candor of voice or touch, they could never be recontained. Plus, there’s this inkling, with Julian’s soigné friends and ambiguous employment and the Dartmouth diploma that he never mentions but hangs framed on his bedroom wall, that wealth is part of it, somehow. And/or race. The power that all this confers on Julian can’t be roleplayed away.

- Rejection, Tony Tulathimutte

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"To a Mouse" by Robert Burns

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The 1960s also saw significant changes to drug legislation, which now required that each new chemical agent specify its active ingredients, the outcomes sought and the delivery period for attaining them. This meant a new kind of surface precision. Drugs would have to pass expensive trials proving they were more effective than a placebo and would work better than other drugs used for the same group of target patients. Likewise, the illnesses they claimed to treat would have to possess well-defined contours. In such a landscape, historians of psychiatry agree that it was the drug industry that largely created the new diagnostic categories. With each new category came a new medication, creating market niches. This shift had a remarkable consequence, predicted with uncanny prescience by the historians. The drugs acted on the visible, disruptive symptoms of psychosis, and over time the actual ‘illness’ that they were supposed to treat became redefined in terms of the effects of the drugs. Rather than seeing the drug as the key to the lock of the illness, the illness was defined as whatever would fit that key, rather like Cinderella’s slipper. One of my patients recently had to see a psychiatrist, and at the end of the consultation he asked about his diagnosis. The psychiatrist replied that he’d have to wait to see how he would respond to the drugs. This was exactly what historians predicted was going to happen. As the anthropologist Andrew Lakoff observes, rather than asking 'Is this a case of bipolar disorder or schizophrenia?' the question would be 'Is it a lithium or an olanzapine response profile?' The drugs had now come to define the illness: it was less aobut finding a drug to fit an illness than an illness that would fit the drug.

-Darian Leader, What is Madness?

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Through the apparent success of the drugs, psychiatry lost interest in the changes and developments a psychosis could undergo without medication and the restitution mechanisms that it could construct. Short-term studies replaced the twenty- and thirty-year studies of the older clinicians, allowing less opportunity to see how people might create their own solutions and stabilizations of psychosis over time, and introducing new dangers.

By dulling the person’s mental abilities, the drug treatments threatened the ability of the psychotic subject to build self-generated defences against their experience of madness. Once we see psychosis as involving a work of construction and creation, there is a real and serious risk that long-term use of drugs will irreparably compromise this. And, indeed, some studies have noted a gradual decline in patient improvement over the last forty or so years, as if the numbing of the patient’s psyche blocked the production of genuine and long-lasting stabilization processes. Ironically, public perceptions of psychosis tend to equate the actual side effects of antipsychotic medication – excessive salivation, jerky movements, extreme lethargy – with the primary symptoms of psychosis itself.

-Darian Leader, What is Madness?

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"It must be nicer to have a patient who will perceptibly change for the better via a medical act than one with whom change may be traced only retroactively after many years of work. And surely, they argued, the fact that many patients diagnosed with schizophrenia failed to improve might generate some antipathy from their doctors? The brain-numbing drug regimes – just like their predecessors, the insulin coma and shock treatments – could then be seen as an unconscious form of retaliation: beyond the conscious care and concern for the patient was a feeling of impotence and frustration. These treatments, at one level, were a punishment for not getting better. As Gérard Pommier observes, is it an accident that today’s drugs are not labelled ‘anti-psychosis’ but, precisely, ‘anti-psychotic’, as if it is the psychotic person themself that needs to be eliminated?"

-Darian Leader, What is Madness?

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"Indeed, the eureka moment in the development of electroshock came when Ugo Cerletti saw how electricity could be used to stun animals in a slaughterhouse, running current not through the whole body, as he had been doing, but just through the head. Dulling the brain was the aim rather than the side effect: shock treatment was like the ‘kicking of a Swiss watch’. This would temper the symptoms as well as making patients easier to deal with, quieter and more compliant. Metrazol, for example, apparently produced a lack of emotional depth, a tendency to withdraw from personal contacts and a decrease in the capacity for self-observation: qualities that, as Kurt Eissler pointed out, would make the patient a more socially accepted individual."

-Darian Leader, What is Madness?

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The written texts, together with his interviews with Gaupp, brought out the logic of the homicides. At eighteen Wagner had started to masturbate, which heralded a catastrophe of self-torment. He was certain that others could tell his guilty secret from his appearance, and interpreted the remarks of those around him as allusions to it. In 1901 he obtained a teaching post in Mülhausen, where, despite various heterosexual relationships, he continued to masturbate. One evening, on the way home from a local inn, he had some kind of sexual contact with animals: no details of what exactly he did were ever fully explained, despite years of questioning by Gaupp. No one had seen Wagner’s act, but he felt he had sinned against the whole of mankind. After that night, he wandered about in an agony of persecution, interpreting conversations he overheard as alluding to his act and sensing the laughter and jeering of the local population. He had become an object of mirth. Wagner knew that if he retaliated he would lose his job, less because of any aggression than because his crime would become known. He began to carry a loaded gun in case the police came for him, even concealing it under his jacket at his own wedding. His marriage was not enough to temper his despair, and Wagner realized that he would have to kill his family as his children might carry the germ of his sexual anomalies. As his feeling that he was an object of scorn and mockery for the men of Mülhausen spread to encompass the neighbouring villages, he bought more guns, practised and planned his revenge. As his sense of persecution increased, Wagner eventually asked for a transfer and was moved to Stuttgart, yet even there he came to believe that his sin was known and laughed at. He had to kill the men of Mülhausen, he said, to stop the gossip. First of all, however, he had to kill his family, out of compassion and to block the stain of bad hereditary transmission. The thought of his children having to live with the shame of their father was unbearable to him, so killing them would save them this pain and simultaneously eradicate any trace of his sin from the world. Then he would set fire to Mülhausen and kill his enemies there. The murders were thus divided into two groups: first of all, the altruistic homicide of his family, and then the retaliatory elimination of his persecutors. What they shared was the task of erasing a fault.

- Darian Leader, What is Madness?

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Discussing the Schreber case, Freud observed that what we take to be the defining features of madness – delusions, hallucinations, etc. – are in fact not primary but secondary symptoms. They are less constitutive of madness than responses to madness, attempts at self-cure, as Bleuler, Jung, Lacan and Winnicott would also argue. What would happen, for example, if people around you started to whisper, spreading malicious gossip about your lack of morals and sexual behaviour, for no apparent reason? You would have to invent a reason. As one woman explained, how could one make sense of all the horrible gossip about her if not by realizing that a double with loose morals was dressing in her clothes and pretending to be her. This was less a bizarre efflorescence of madness than a hypothesis with explanatory power, less insanity than a response of reason to insanity. It was, perhaps, good thinking. Madness and reason were thus not opposed but identical, as Erasmus and Pascal had famously argued. [...] A delusion can thus be a way of trying to understand one's experiences, drawing on all the faculties of inference and deduction at one's disposal to find an answer. In the words of G.K. Chesterton, the madman has lost everything except his reason.

- Darian Leader, What is Madness?

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fighting demons rn (figuring out which passages from what is madness i've already published, which are in drafts, which are supposed to be kept together, etc)

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Whether it’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Girl Interrupted or A Beautiful Mind, why is madness always made so visible, so tangible, so audible? People talk to imaginary companions, they foam at the mouth, they have terrifying hallucinations, they blabber incessantly, they rant and rave about a plot against them. Generally, they are depicted either as incredibly clever or incredibly stupid, as genius or brute, yet with little in between. There is no doubt that madness is sometimes accompanied by striking symptomology, but what about the case of the man who calmly goes about his business and family life, one day goes to work, does his job impeccably, then goes to a public place, pulls out a gun and shoots some public figure? There is nothing noticeably abnormal about their behaviour until that moment. They may in fact have been a model citizen, responsible, respectable and even-tempered. But, in the time preceding their homicidal act, could we really say that they were not mad? Surely it invites us to think about those instances of madness that are compatible with normal life. This is a quiet, contained madness, until the moment it erupts in the act of violence. But what if the act of violence never came? What if, in our example, the man just carried on with his daily life? If there was madness before the act, what if it just continued in its quiet way, bothering no one, drawing no attention to itself. If madness and normality are indeed compatible, would that person be any more mad whether they had pulled the trigger or not? What if nothing of any note had occurred, and they had just pursued their daily routines and activities. Perhaps they might have taken up some hobby at retirement – a piece of historical research, a genealogical investigation, the study of a science – or started writing – letters, notebooks, a novel. This would be a normal life by all accounts, yet would it be any less mad than its more visible, spectacular shadow? [...] Perhaps, at some level, we not only expect this from madness but actually want it, as if to externalize the latent feelings of violence we all harbor within ourselves.

- Darian Leader, What is Madness?

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"Despite the ubiquitous lip service to respecting difference and diversity, people today are coerced more than ever to think in uniform ways, from the nursery to the corridors of professional life. We see this reflected in the mental health world, where treatment is often considered an almost mechanized technique to be applied to a passive patient, rather than as a joint collaborative work, where each party has responsibilities. There is increasing pressure today to see mental health services as a kind of garage, where people are rehabilitated and sent back to their jobs – and perhaps to their families – as soon as possible. The psychotic subject has become less a person to be listened to than an object to be treated. "

-Darian Leader, What is Madness?

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It is so easy to be solemn; it is so hard to be frivolous. Let any honest reader shut his eyes for a few moments, and approaching the secret tribunal of his soul, ask himself whether he would really rather be asked in the next two hours to write the front page of the Times, which is full of long leading articles, or the front page of Tit-Bits, which is full of short jokes. If the reader is the fine conscientious fellow I take him for, he will at once reply that he would rather on the spur of the moment write ten Times articles than one Tit-Bits joke. Responsibility, a heavy and cautious responsibility of speech, is the easiest thing in the world; anybody can do it. That is why so many tired, elderly, and wealthy men go in for politics. They are responsible, because they have not the strength of mind left to be irresponsible. It is more dignified to sit still than to dance the Barn Dance. It is also easier. So in these easy pages I keep myself on the whole on the level of the Times: it is only occasionally that I leap upwards almost to the level of Tit-Bits.

- G.K. Chesterton, "The Case of the Ephemeral" from All Things Considered

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What we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity of his work the infinity of forms that he has comprised in it; and it is for us to believe that this figure that astonishes us is related and linked to some other figure of the same kind unknown to man. From his infinite wisdom there proceeds nothing but that is good and ordinary and regular; but we do not see its arrangement and relationship. What he sees often, he does not wonder at, even if he does not know why it is. If something happens which he has not seen before, he thinks it is a prodigy [Cicero].

We call contrary to nature what happens contrary to custom; nothing is anything but according to nature, whatever it may be. Let this universal and natural reason drive out of us the error and astonishment that novelty brings us.

-Montaigne, "Of a monstrous child" from Essais, tr. Donald Frame

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There was a new vulnerability in him. It made Ma think of a small child who raged with the murderous desire to hurt the parent who had frustrated it, then afterwards clung to that same parent with hysterical cries of guilt, because its desire had been genuine, and of relief, that it hadn't been strong enough to make its wish come true.

- Shelley Parker-Chan, He Who Drowned the World

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She thought of the first time she'd seen ghosts. It had been a moment like this one: a new, terrible knowledge revealed to her alone, while everyone else continued in ignorance. It had been a step into a dark, sideways world that always shadowed the real one, and from which there was no return. Zhu had dared to desire the world. But how could a human body--a human skin, a human soul--hold this agony that was the price of that desire, and survive?

- Shelley Parker-Chan, He Who Drowned the World

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But someone's face against his--the insistence of another's lips and mouth upon his own--was an assertion of self he'd never been able to deny. Baoxiang kissed the Third Prince, and knew why his impulse had taken this particular form. It was the antithesis of rejection. It was the reciprocal creation of themselves as two people alive to each other, present to each other, each made real by the brush of another's personhood against his own.

- Shelley Parker-Chan, He Who Drowned the World